Picture this.  Your company is small- to medium-sized with a marketing budget to match.  The economy is stinkaroo and your company big cheeses have told you to keep up the lead generation efforts – and even gen more leads – at the same or less budget.

One of the things I love about Salesforce.com is how readily you can automate your marketing efforts -- and you don't have to be big to do it.  Via Salesforce, you can:

• Automate lead data entry and follow up.
• Determine what activities are contributing to your pipeline.
• Determine your marketing ROI.
• Provide consistent branding and messaging for your sales teams.
• Make your company look bigger.

Let’s talk about some marketing automation tips and best practices for lead management.  This is kind of a list day for me so here are quick hits.

Salesforce marketing automation tips

1. Enable web to lead automation:  Capture information from online forms and import it into your Leads tab. 
2. Create auto-responder emails:  Select messaging based on the source of the lead capture (for example, white papers versus a webinar).
3. Use HTML email templates (and the corresponding text versions) to create emails.
4. Use Campaigns to launch and track marketing initiatives (such as monthly newsletters, promotional offers, advertisements, etc).
5. Define lead scoring rules.
6. Define and automate lead assignment rules.  Also automate notification of appropriate Sales rep of new lead.
7. Make use of Documents tab:  To ensure Sales has current documentation for logos, product sheets, pricing, etc.
8. Create meaningful dashboards to track your marketing metrics.

How to enable the tips

Another of the many things I like about Salesforce is the quality of its documentation.  Most of what you need to do to enable the tips outlined above is spelled out in their Help files.  However, if you need help or want to outsource the activities, then don't hesitate to give Intellicore Design a shout.  Pop over to our online chat box to send up an IM or contact us via phone or email.